facedown on the extra pillow, while he lay faceup, sweat evaporating from his chest, chilling him.
'Jesus,' he said after a while. 'That was all right. I was a little worried.'
Her head turned. 'About what?'
'It's been a while.'
She propped herself up on one elbow. 'Ah. A little depression?'
'I guess,' he said, curiously ready to talk about it. He'd never talked about problems with Jennifer. 'I had all the symptoms.'
She crawled over him, reaching, switched on the bedside lamp. He winced and turned away from it.
'Look here,' she said, showing her wrists to him. There were two whiter lines on the inside of each, parallel, transverse. Scars to be read as clearly as needle tracks.
'What's this shit?' he said. He took her wrists in his hands and stroked the scars with his thumbs.
'What do they look like?'
'Like you cut your wrists,' he said.
She nodded. 'You win the golden weenie. Fake suicide attempt-that's what the shrinks say. Depression.'
'The scars don't look so fake,' he said.
'I didn't think so, either,' she said, pulling her wrists away. 'Are there any cigarettes around here?'
'No. I didn't know you smoked.'
'I don't, except after sex,' she said.
'Those were pretty heavy cuts. Tell me…'
She sat up and pulled her knees under her chin, looking down at him. 'This was five years ago. I was never in much danger. A lot of blood, and I had to go to counseling for a few months.'
'What's fake about that?' Lucas asked, rolling up on an elbow.
'What the shrinks say is, I was living with this guy and he had a gun, and I knew where it was. And our apartment was on the seventh floor, I could have jumped. And I knew the guy was coming home pretty soon. So they say I really wanted to live and this was just an attempt to draw attention to my condition.'
'But the cuts…'
'Yeah. The shrinks are full of shit. They can tell you how to talk to someone else, how to deal with personal problems, but they don't know what happens inside your head, unless it's happened to them. I could have jumped out the window. I could have shot myself. But that's not what I thought of. I had this, like…'
'Fixation.'
'Yeah. Exactly,' she said, smiling at him. 'See, you know. The theater's got a whole oral literature about killing yourself and knives are the way to do it. I fucked it up, did it all wrong-I should have cut myself lengthwise, or at the elbow, but I didn't know that. I could have used little pieces of glass, you get a better cut that way, but I didn't know that, either.'
Lucas shuddered. 'Glass. I saw that once. You don't want to cut yourself with glass.'
'I'll keep that in mind,' she said wryly.
'So you cut yourself…?'
'Yep. I just hacked and sat there and bled and cried until my friend came home. They didn't even give me a transfusion at the hospital,' Cassie said. 'Good thing, too. This was back when there was AIDS in the blood supply. Though who'd ever know, with me fuckin' actors, and all.'
'Jesus, that makes me feel good…' He looked down at himself.
'Maybe you oughta run dip it in Lysol…' she said.
'Don't have any Lysol-I got some Oven-Off,' he said, and laughed. She grinned and patted his leg. 'So what were you going to do? Your guns?'
He looked at her for a minute and then nodded. 'Yeah. I've got a gun safe down in the basement. It was like they were glowing down there, the guns. Glowing with some kind of gravity, or magnetism, or something. I could feel them wherever I was, pulling me down there. It didn't make any difference if I was on the other side of Minneapolis, I could feel them. I carry a gun, but I never thought about using it. It was the guns in the safe, pulling me down.'
'You ever go down? Just to look, or handle them? Stick one in your ear?'
'Nope. I would of felt stupid,' Lucas said.
She threw back her head and laughed, but not a happy laugh; an acknowledgment. 'I think a lot of suicides are avoided because you'd feel stupid. Or because of the way you'd look afterwards. Like hanging…' She gripped herself around the throat and squeezed, crossing her eyes and sticking her tongue out.
'Jesus,' he said, laughing again.
She turned serious. 'Did you think about it because everything was too painful, or what?'
'No. I just couldn't handle what was going on in my head, this, this storm. I couldn't sleep: I'd have these crazy fucking episodes where nine million thoughts would go pounding through my head, and I couldn't stop them. Crazy shit. You know, like the names of people in my senior class, or all the guys on the hockey squad, and all kinds of bizarre shit, and you get crazy because you forget a couple of them.'
'That's pretty common,' Cassie said, nodding.
'But basically, I thought about the guns because it didn't seem to make any difference whether I lived or died. It was like, Heads I live, tails I die-and if you keep flipping, it'll come up tails, sooner or later.'
Cassie nodded. 'There was a guy I knew in New York, he used to play Russian roulette with a revolver. About once a year he'd spin that thing, that…'
'Cylinder.'
'Yeah. Then he'd put the barrel in his mouth and pull the trigger. Right around Christmastime. Said it kept him straight for a whole 'nother year.'
'What happened to him?' Lucas asked.
'I don't know. He wasn't that good a friend. He was still alive the last time I was in New York. I could never figure out if he was lucky or unlucky.'
'Huh.'
She stretched out again, her hands behind her head, and they lay beside each other in comfortable silence for a minute. 'Did you have the voice in the back of your head, watching you go through all this shit?' she asked finally.
'Yeah. The watcher. It was like having my own critic back there. My own journalist.'
She giggled. 'I never thought of it that way, but that's it. Like, the major part of me was hacking away with a bread knife-'
'Ah, fuck, a bread knife?'
'Yeah, the kind with the serrated blade?'
'Ah, Jesus…'
'Good brand, too, Solingen…'
'God, Cassie…'
'Anyway, the big part was hacking away, and this little voice was back there reporting on it, like CNN or something. Kind of skeptical, too.'
'Jesus.' He reached out and stroked her, from navel to breasts, and back down across her groin to the inside of her knee.
'Pretty gross, huh? Anyway, I'm glad you're getting better.'
'I'm not really sure I am…'
'Oh, you are.' She patted the bed. 'You're here. When you're really depressed, your sex life jumps in a car and leaves for Chicago. I was in this group, as part of the therapy, and every one of the men said so. It wasn't that they couldn't-they just couldn't stand the thought of the complications. Sex is the first thing to go. When it comes back, you're definitely getting better.'
The phone rang at eleven o'clock. Lucas woke clear-eyed, rested, already rolling toward the edge of the bed before he was aware of the weight on the other side. He'd slept, and dreamed, and had almost forgotten…
Cassie was lying facedown again, bare as the day she was born, the sheet covering her hips. Her hair had parted on either side of her head, and the light slanting through the venetian blinds played across the sensuous turn of her vertebrae, starting at the nape of her neck, trailing down almost to her just hidden tailbone. He reached down, still aware of the phone, now ringing the fourth time, or fifth, and gently slid the sheet even farther
